


dusty eyes hardened heart

by summershudder



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Multi, a super emo summary of my shep's story i guess, no one who's tagged in it dies tho, plenty of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-03
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-12-10 13:25:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11692551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summershudder/pseuds/summershudder
Summary: Elissa Shepard didn't expect to survive Mindoir. She didn't expect to survive Torfan. She didn't want to survive the Reapers. But life is full of surprises. One shot.





	dusty eyes hardened heart

**Author's Note:**

> Elissa "Liss" Shepard is my custom Fem!shep, colonist/ruthless/vanguard/paragade with a renegade lean. She's romantically involved with both Tali and Garrus. I took some creative liberties with canon, but this isn't a fix-it.

Liss wasn’t much of a crier. She tried, sometimes. It seemed like the thing to do, when the galaxy was in shambles and she was the only one who could fix it—the only one even willing to try. Who wouldn’t cry about that, at least once? But she couldn’t make the tears come. Not even in the soft, quiet darkness of 3am, not even with Garrus and Tali long asleep and no one to see her but the stars above.  
  
She used to cry as a kid, she knew. Often, even. She remembered crying over scraped knees and lost pets, teasing brothers and schoolyard drama on Mindoir. Her mother always said she was _expressive;_ Liss supposed was just a nice way of saying _touchy_. But after the attack it all just… stopped. Like something deep inside her had snapped shut, and taken all her tears with it.  
  
She tried to cry at her family’s funeral. She wanted to—or at least, she wanted to want to. But the last of her tears had been spent planetside in her brother’s blood, and now all she really felt was empty. It was like she was watching herself from a distance, sluggishly throwing commands to a body which received them garbled and strange. She tried to cry—instead she flinched and shook. Vaguely she was aware of her aunt speaking to her—she tried to listen but understood nothing. Eventually her head would clear, somewhat, her body returned to her own governance. But the tears never came. Her aunt always said she was _odd;_ Liss supposed that was a nice way of saying _cold_.  
  
She almost cried after Torfan. It was a revenge ten years in the making, ten years of grinding and clawing and ‘yes, ma’am’-ing and ‘no, sir’-ing her way into her own command. She’d told herself she was willing to pay any price, even her own life. In the end the cost was six—none of them hers. Well, they knew what they signed up for—and the galaxy was better off for every slaver left dead in exchange. Each member of her squad to die took down a dozen of those Batarian scum with them. Still, it left a gnawing in her gut. When the Alliance made her an N7 for it, they called her _efficient;_ Liss knew that was a nice way of saying _heartless_.  
After that she promised herself she wouldn’t lose any more crew. Not unless she had to. So leaving Alenko behind on Virmire brought another lump to her throat. He had begged her to leave him— _save Williams, Commander_ —but that didn’t make it much easier. And the way Ash looked at her in the com room afterwards… Well, Liss knew then that the Alliance was right. _Heartless_. She’d snapped at Ash to get over it— _soldiers die, Ash_ —but afterwards she spent three hours staring at the wall in her cabin, angry and twitchy and ashamed. At least tears would make her human. But still, none came.  
  
A year later, and she thought she’d repaid him. When the SR-1 was a wreckage of flames, she stayed. The dutiful Captain, going down with her ship to save the lives of her crew—it was good. Right. Finally it was she who would pay with her life, after she had thrown so many others into the flames to feed her own ambitions. Seven stars she’d had emblazoned on her bicep to remind her, and now the debt was paid. She floated through the empty void of space, oxygen-deprived brain providing her with garbled images of people she knew and killed and loved. Things were as they should be.  
  
And then—then she woke up. Woke up in the cold, sterile white of a lab, alarms blaring, her muscles screaming, and an unfamiliar voice shouting at her to _get up and grab that gun_. It was adrenaline alone that carried her through those first few hours of her second chance—second fucking chance, as if she’d asked for it. Once the adrenaline was gone all that was left was a despair so heavy she could barely move, and she wished desperately for the tears she’d long accepted she didn’t have. Two years she’d been gone. Two years for all her work to come unraveled like so much thread; two years closer to an invasion no one but Liss had done anything to prevent; two years for her friends to forget her name and startle at her return like a ghost.  
  
They called her lucky, then—miraculous. But Liss knew she wasn’t a miracle. She was cursed.  
  
Death became her constant companion, if it wasn’t before. Cheated of her soul, it followed her as closely as her shadow, as intimately as a lover, stealing everyone and everything she touched. She lost the colonists, their stolen blood and bones ground into pulp to feed that abomination at the galaxy’s core. Mindoir was among them; she comforted herself with the knowledge that her family, at least, was already dead.  
  
She lost Miranda, in the sickly green caverns of the collector base—sneering, arrogant, _fearless_ Miranda. She had been insufferable when she was alive; in death, she was worse. Miranda was Elissa’s ruthlessness without her guilt; her skill without her recklessness; her intelligence without that smothering cottonmouth ache which hovered omnipresent in the base of her skull. The galaxy needed Miranda. Instead it got Liss.  
  
She lost the little boy on Earth. She watched him scuttle off into the sewers like a rat, crying and terrified, and she left him there. If he wanted to die, she thought, fine. Let him. She was tired. It was different, of course, when he actually did. Of that, she was reminded near nightly.  
  
She lost Mordin and Thane in quick succession, a hero’s death to them both. Mordin sacrificed himself to save people who deserved it; Thane to save people who didn’t. Liss tried not to resent him for that—throwing his life away when all she wanted was for him to live. She was selfish that way, she supposed. Another fantastic trait for a galactic savior.  
  
Death stole Legion from her next, and his whole people fell beside him. And she’d let it happen. She’d let it happen. She didn’t know why. Something about the way Tali said _please_ , the way she trembled toward the cliffside, opened a raw, yawning pit of dread in Elissa’s stomach, and she’d heard herself telling Legion to _stop the upload_ before she’d even realized she was doing it.  
  
She would have let him kill her. She deserved it, and maybe then Death would be satisfied. But Tali saved her life, and Liss wondered numbly how long it would be until she paid for it.  
  
It was that knowledge, that she had stood by and supervised a genocide, for a reason she couldn’t even name, which saw Liss choking in the bathroom, trying desperately to force herself into tears. Of course she failed—not even the deaths of a million—a billion?—could pry a teardrop from the Butcher of Torfan. The Butcher of Rannoch, now. She settled instead for self-destruction, to vomit and scream and punch the mirror until her hands were reduced to mangled slabs of bleeding meat and broken glass. For once, Tali didn’t try to stop her. She was too busy wallowing in her own grief; wrestling with the knowledge that she had chosen her own people’s survival at another’s expense, that it was her intel that backed them into this corner, and that she had painted that blood onto Elissa’s hands with her own fear of being alone in the universe. Liss slumped in her chair, skull pounding, and watched with a dull, perverse sort of envy as Tali’s mask clouded with tears. She wondered what that felt like. It had been so long, she couldn’t remember. She supposed it must be nice.  
  
After that, Liss threw herself into her work even more than before. She wasn’t Liss any longer—she was Commander Shepard, a tool and a weapon, and her existence was for one purpose only. Thessia, Horizon, Cronos Station—all of them slipped by in a blind frenzy of cold, scalpel-like efficiency. Weeks passed like heartbeats. The asari died, screaming and burning in the wreckage of their homeworld; Shepard kept walking. Dr. Lawson begged for his life; Shepard shot him before the sentence was out of his mouth. The vid logs on the station confirmed that she had died a long time ago. She was nothing but a robot now, but what would have sent Liss spiraling rolled off Shepard like oil. Kai Leng thought he was going to taunt her, bait her with guilt and sneak away in her grief; instead she gutted him with his own sword and spat on the corpse. She was going to Earth. She was stopping the Reapers. It no longer mattered how.  
  
She didn’t know how many atrocities she killed on Earth, nor did she care. Once, she and Garrus would have made a game of counting; neither of them spoke of it now. She walked through the battlefield a specter of dripping gore. Her biotics tore through everything in her path like a hurricane; her companions barely had anything left to shoot. Once, a human soldier, some panicked, drafted eighteen-year-old, darted out of cover while her biotics stormed. He fared no better than the husks. Shepard barely noticed.  
  
She talked to her friends one last time, at the base camp—only Garrus would admit this was, in all likelihood, goodbye. It didn’t matter. She’d keep them safe.  
  
_Go kick ass, Shep_ , Jack said. Her eyes were red.  
  
_It’s been an honor, Skipper_ , Ash said. Her voice trembled, just slightly, but her salute was sharp.  
  
_Come back to me, Lissa_ , Tali whispered. She clutched at Shepard’s fingers with trembling hands.  
  
Garrus gave her a long, quiet look. _I don’t know if Turian heaven is the same as human heaven, Liss,_ he said. _But if we both end up there today—meet me_.  
  
She closed her eyes and said, _I will._  
  
The rest was a roaring blur of blood and pain and exhaustion. Every step she took, the cottonmouth ache in her skull thrummed louder, harsher, thicker. Sometimes she thought she heard words. _Join_.  
  
_Become-_  
  
_-salvation-_  
  
_-destiny._  
  
She blocked them out, gritting her teeth with the effort, and pressed on. Through the beam, the death-stench was overwhelming. She knew the Keepers were Reaper thralls, but it never truly sunk in until then, watching them casually picking at the corpses. They stowed away shiny baubles and chewed bits of loose flesh as calmly as emptying trashbins. She shot one of them, adding its corpse to the pile, and kept going. Its fellows scavenged it like the rest.  
  
It didn’t surprise her to meet The Illusive Man there. For all she’d fantasized about killing him, she was too numb to enjoy it now. He dropped before her pistol just like anyone else, all his machinations reduced to a sack of lifeless meat.  
  
_I’m proud of you, child,_ Anderson said. Then Death took him too. Shepard kept walking.  
  
When she met the Catalyst, the ache in her head became deafening. Something inside her skull whispered her name. _Join us, Shepard. Become us. This is your salvation; this is your destiny._  
  
It regarded her with a stolen face, plucked from her memories like fruit from a tree. The little boy from Earth—a child, trying to tug her heartstrings into taking its side, to distract her from the conduit which could end this all forever. _You couldn’t kill me a second time, could you?_ it seemed to ask her.  
  
It might have worked on someone else. But Shepard was cold. She was heartless, and selfish, and cursed, and she would kill him again a thousand times if it meant she could end this.  
  
_I’m destroying the Reapers,_ she told it. As she had told herself, many times. _Destroy them_ —the only reason she got up in the morning. _Destroy them_ —the only reason she worked into the night. _That_ was her only destiny; there would be no salvation. _No_ , the voice in her head whispered. _No._ Her skull throbbed. She limped towards the conduit.  
  
The Catalyst circled her like a vulture. _You’re part synthetic yourself, you know,_ it wheedled her, wringing its hands, tilting its head. Trying to hide its own nervousness. _Destroying us will almost certainly kill you as well. Don’t you know that? Aren’t you afraid?_  
  
_Afraid?_  
  
She grinned at it, more snarl than smile, and opened fire.  
  
+++  
  
She thought that was it. She thought she was done. And yet here she is. Waking up.  
  
It isn’t a lab this time, though her heart is already racing and her breath coming in short, panicked gasps by the time she realizes that. It’s a hospital. She doesn’t have time to decide if that’s better or worse before she hears a familiar voice calling for the nurse.  
  
Garrus’s face appears in front of her, blue eyes wide. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days.  
  
_Liss? Liss, tell me you can hear me,_ he pleads. His voice sounds tinny and strange, and she realizes she can’t hear him at all out of her left ear. But the pain at the base of her skull is gone. She hadn’t realized how horrible it was until it was gone. Everything else hurts worse than hell—but her thoughts feel so much clearer.  
  
Weakly, disoriented, she nods, and Garrus lets out a long-held breath. Slowly the rest of the world comes into focus.  
  
Tali appears next. She touches Elissa’s face with the reverence of a holy relic—like she could disappear at any moment—and then pulls her into her arms, crying and babbling about how she’d thought Liss was gone. Garrus holds to her arm like he’s trying to anchor her here. Like he thinks she’ll turn to smoke.  
  
Jack is doubled over at the foot of the bed. She’s laughing so hard her whole body shakes. _I fucking told you assholes,_ she says. _I told you she’d be back. I told you._ She grins at Liss with dripping, glowing eyes. _You fucker, I knew you’d be back._  
  
Ash hovers by the window. Her eyes are clenched shut, and she whispers to the crucifix clutched in her hand. Liss reads her lips. _Thank God. Thank God._  
  
The nurse appears a moment later, chasing her friends to the edges of the room before he takes her vitals and scribbles on a chart. Liss watches him work with vague, startled wonder—vitals. Alive. He smiles kindly at her before he leaves, but whatever he says Liss doesn’t catch.  
  
Alive. She’s alive. A wave of nausea breaks over her, and she feels her breathing speeding up again. Another resurrection she didn’t ask for. Another death cheated. Another rest denied. She’ll pay for it, she knows she will—  
  
But there’s no alarms this time. No Cerberus, no glowing scars, no cybernetics. No reapers. Just a vase of flowers and a window for her to see the sky. Regular plaster casts on her legs and bandages on her arms. And her four closest friends, among them her lovers, looking at her like they want nothing else in the world but for her to be here.  
  
She tilts back her head and closes her eyes, trying to get her breathing under control. She’s here. After everything that’s happened, everything she’s been through, she’s here.  
  
When she feels the wetness on her cheeks, she thinks it must be blood. What else could it be? Annoyed, she sits forward to wipe it away on the back of her hand. It comes back clear. She realizes her eyes are stinging. Her vision is blurry and strange. She blinks, and colorless droplets spatter on the bedsheet below.  
  
Once she realizes what’s happening, it’s impossible to stop.  
  
She cries for her family. She was only fifteen when she lost them; it’s not until now that she understands how young fifteen really is. She cries for Kaiden and her old squad, for Miranda and Mordin and Thane. They were all so brave. She cries for the geth, slaughtered for wanting to live. She cries for Thessia. She cries for Anderson. He’d always believed in her, Anderson.  
  
And she cries for herself. She cries for when she was Ellie instead of Liss, and the world still made sense. She cries for when she was Liss instead of Commander Shepard, and the fate of the galaxy could depend on someone else. She cries for when she thought she could still save everyone, and she cries because she didn’t. And she cries because it was her. Of all the better, stronger, more qualified people in the galaxy, it was her who had to do this. And she lived. She clenches her teeth and sobs, sobs until she’s gasping for breath and dizzy.  
  
It’s been seventeen years since the last time she cried. Seventeen years of war and death and pain. More than half her life. She feels older than thirty-two. She feels older than anyone has any right to be.  
  
And yet, she’s here.  
  
When she comes back to herself, finally, a strange sense of peace settles over her. Crying will do that to you, so she’s heard. Her friends are waiting. They linger around her bed in silent vigil, hands on her back or in her hair or twining with her fingers. All of them have scars she hasn’t seen before. They look about as tired as Liss feels.  
  
The dead weren’t the only brave ones. Just like her, these people are still here. Still fighting. Still alive.  
  
She’s not sure she can do it by herself. Keep living, after all this. But maybe… maybe they can do it together. One day at a time.


End file.
